EVENT UPDATE—POSTPONED

Dear readers—

Unfortunately the event is being rescheduled, and will not take place this Saturday, November 6th. The event will take place in the near future, but details are not yet finalized. 

So please do not come to High Concept Laboratories this Saturday. I’m sorry for everyone who was looking forward to this weekend—this change is out of my control. I’ll keep posting information about the event (as it shapes up) and the novel, so stay tuned!

—Peter

New News

So based on my now estimation, reading chapters 2—12 will take 14 hours. So we gotta cut some down—about 50 pages worth. Bummer. There’s definitely some to be cut, though. More soon_______________________________________

18. Post “Theatrical Readings”

A friend recently directed me to an article in the New York Times, about a seven-hour performance reading of The Great Gatsby (another high-ranking novel on the Modern Library’s list, natch) taking place at the Public Theater in NYC. Called “Gatz,” the performance by the Elevator Repair Service is set within an overcrowded office, read awkwardly at first by an office worker—then taken up by more staff members. A monotone, bored reading slowly takes on life, characterization and sound-effects; others join in, playing different roles and reading from the book. The reviewer, Charles McGrath, opines that it isn’t so much a staged reading of the novel as a “dramatization of the act of reading itself — of what happens when you immerse yourself in a book.”

Most interesting in this analysis is McGrath’s assertion that this is “what happens when you get caught up in a book. You hear it in your head, and it takes over your waking existence a little, so you can’t wait to be done with whatever you’re doing and immerse yourself in the pages again.” Yet the response of the audience is uneven: sometimes immersed in the story, sometimes bored, other times asleep. Also interesting (to me, at least) is the tension between the senses of seeing and hearing: are there aspects of the novel that are more effective when read aloud, as opposed to being read silently and voiced to ourselves alone? And what role does the silent audience play in this distinction—a room full of hushed (and sleepy?) listeners certainly affect the energy of the experience. 

McGrath goes on to guess that we readers are becoming more comfortable as ‘listeners’ due to the prevalence of audiobooks, and traces that back to a long tradition of reading aloud: “Before literacy was widespread, a person who could read would sometimes do so in public for the benefit of others, and well into the 19th century there was a custom of reading aloud as family entertainment.” As I mentioned before, most of us have been read to by our parents—there is a certain intimacy in the exchange. It no longer becomes the monologue of the author, or (perhaps) a conversation in our head with the author; the experience is overlaid with the relationship between the reader and (us) the listener. This draws the experience of the medium forward: we never ‘ingest’ a book wholesale without a particular medium; I wonder, how do changes in the medium affect our experience of the book? 

The synesthesia of audio and visual perception, and the mixture of a private activity made public are also greatly interesting to me. Reading Under the Volcano takes this set-up a bit further, by placing the nexus of power not with ‘actors on stage,’ but with the ‘audience’, again breaking up common distinctions. I’m excited.